Kids Deserve Privacy Online. They’re Not Getting It.

Childhood is the crucible in which our identities and ambitions are forged. It’s when we sing into our hairbrushes and confide in our diaries. It’s when we puzzle out who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to live our lives.

But to be a modern child is to be constantly watched by machines. The more time kids spend online, the more information about them is collected by companies seeking to influence their behavior, in the moment and for decades to come. By the time they’re toddlers, many of today’s children already know how to watch videos, play games, take pictures, and FaceTime their grandparents. By the time they are 10, 42 percent of them have a smartphone. By the time they are 12, nearly half use social media. The internet was already ingrained in children’s lives, but the coronavirus pandemic made it essential for remote learning, connecting with friends, and entertainment. Watching online videos has surged past television as the media activity that kids enjoy the most; children cite YouTube as the one site they wouldn’t want to live without.

The Atlantic’s Guide to Privacy: Three simple rules for protecting your privacy

That children need special protections online and everywhere else is obvious. And indeed, under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), web platforms and creators of digital products are required to obtain parental consent before collecting and sharing digital identifiers (such as location, email, and device serial number) that can be traced back to a child under the age of 13.

COPPA was passed in 1998. Compliance is largely voluntary, and evidently spotty. In 2020, when researchers studied 451 apps used by 3- and 4-year-olds, they found that two-thirds collected digital identifiers. Other research suggests that children’s apps contain more third-party trackers than those geared toward adults. And even if an app or product is COPPA compliant, it can still collect highly valuable, potentially identifying information. In today’s hyper-aggregated digital landscape, every nugget of information can easily be stitched together with other information to create a richly detailed dossier that clearly identifies you in particular.

The harvesting process, it’s important to note, tends to be automated and indiscriminate in what information it collects. A company can amass private information about your child even when it doesn’t intend to. In 2021, TikTok rewrote its privacy policy to allow it to gather “voiceprints” and “faceprints”—that is, voice recordings and images of users’ faces, along with all of the identifying information that can be gleaned from them. And we know that at least 18 million of TikTok’s U.S. users are likely age 14 or younger. It’s not difficult to imagine that children would sometimes share sensitive personal information on TikTok, whether TikTok intended to collect that information or not.

You get the picture; it’s bleak. All in all, by the time a child reaches the age of 13, online advertising firms have collected an average of 72 million data points about them. That’s not even considering the degree to which children’s data are shared and their privacy potentially compromised by the people closest to them—sometimes in the form of a grainy sonogram posted to social media before they are even born. As of 2016, the average child in Britain had about 1,500 images of them posted online by the time they hit their fifth birthday.

We typically take it as a given that adults have a right to decide, for ourselves, who is allowed to know our private thoughts, utterances, and actions. Kids have this right too. All human beings need privacy if we are to entertain thoughts, communicate these thoughts with trusted others, and act on these thoughts without fear of interference, judgment, or censure.

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